Nelson, Amber | USA

Amber D. Nelson is currently a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology & Society in Graz Austria. She is also completing a PhD in sociology at the University of Maryland.  She holds a MA in sociology from Maryland and BAs in sociology and English from the University of Nebraska.  Amber studies the social aspects of health and medicine, clinical professions, medical technologies and policy.  She recently published work on the social aspects of the Human Papillomavirus Vaccine and finished research on an NSF-funded grant study designed to evaluate the socioeconomic benefits of medical research on six different morbidities conducted at NIH.  Her PhD thesis, titled “Technoscientific Knowledge-Practices of Adolescent Mental Health Care Work” is a qualitative grounded theory analysis of the social aspects of the classification, measurement and clinical interventions of adolescent mental health and illness.  As a National Academies of Science Mirzayan Fellow in Winter 2011, Amber worked with the Board on Children, Youth and Families (BCYF) in the Institute of Medicine (IOM).  She organized a symposium on integrating youth mental health services in primary care settings, assisted Jennifer Gootman in organizing a 10 year follow-up meeting to the influential 2002 consensus study "Community Programs to Promote Youth Development"  and developed a proposal for how to evaluate college mental health education and outreach programs such as Active Minds, Inc. In her free time Amber enjoys baking, hiking, gardening, reading, attending musical performances, traveling and being with friends and family.

Project at IAS-STS: Biomedicalization and Geneticization of Societal Understandings, Funding and Policy of Mental Health and Illness

At IAS-STS, Amber will expand her dissertation to analyze the social impact of biomedical or life science knowledges and the ways in which they shape understandings of mental health and illness. This will include extending an analysis of the biomedicalization of mental health and illness to examine how the emergent field of behavioral genetics and Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) genetic testing technologies shape societal funding and policy on and meanings of, mental health and illness. In addition, she would also like to gain a better understanding of STS work on Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) during her stay at IAS-STS in Graz. This year she hopes to write a grant proposal for funding to study the ways in which ICTs such as Shrinkrapt  and Therascribe shape the content as well as the form of clinical interventions of mental health care work.

Selected Publications

Mamo, L., A. Nelson & A. Clark. 2010. Producing and Protecting Risky Girlhood's - In Three Shots at Prevention: The HPV Vaccine and the Politics of Medicine's Simple Solutions, edited by Keith Wailoo, Julie Livingston, Steven Epstein and Robert Aronowitz. Johns Hopkins University Press